


don't you shake alone

by musicspeakstoo



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 13:31:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20743004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicspeakstoo/pseuds/musicspeakstoo
Summary: The night Michael hears that Alex has signed up for another tour of duty, he goes down to the Wild Pony and provokes a table full of guys from the nearby base until the greenest one throws a punch.





	don't you shake alone

**Author's Note:**

> I have no excuse for this, I watched the whole first season in like five days and found myself terribly enamored not only with Michael and Alex's relationship, but with Michael himself. So this fic is part season 2 speculation, part relationship fic, and part character study. Warning that this fic briefly mentions child abuse suffered by both Alex and Michael, as well as the terrible moment in the tool shed.
> 
> This whole thing is unbeta'd so all mistakes are mine. Title is from Dear Avery by the Decemberists.

Michael likes Maria, is the thing. She’s hot and doesn’t take any of his shit, he can appreciate how tight a ship she runs at the Wild Pony. He’s not sure when flirting with her by rote became flirting with intent but it did. It’s just that Alex Manes blew back into his life around the same time and Michael’s only, well, not human but he is a pathetic sap. 

Maybe it would have been easier, if Michael hadn’t kissed him. 

Maybe if Alex hadn’t kissed him back, kept kissing him. 

It was the thing they did the most, those few short months they had together. Often it was frantic, both of them afraid to get caught and maybe to prevent themselves from thinking too hard. There were a few times where they would slow it down, sure enough of their safety to take their time. Fast or slow, Alex’s kisses are the thing Michael remembers about him most vividly. 

So of course that’s what ruins him.

What ruins him and Maria is that she’s looking for something uncomplicated and easy to counterbalance all the shit going down with her mom. Unfortunately, Michael is nothing but complicated these days and eventually she starts asking questions he can’t answer.

Even after they break up, Alex sits like a weight between them, unacknowledged but present.

~~

The night Michael hears that Alex has signed up for another tour of duty, he goes down to the Wild Pony and provokes a table full of guys from the nearby base until the greenest one throws a punch.

Max handcuffs him to a table and then goes to make his apologies to Maria. While Jesse Manes is escorting the airmen out of the bar, Michael has just enough of a window to hiss “you don’t deserve him” as the man walks by.

Manes just looks down his nose at Michael, not even faltering in his stride.

That’s when Michael realizes that he’s never really going to be over Alex. 

The next morning after he finally gets released from the drunk tank, he goes straight to his bunker and ends up discovering that the pieces of what he’s now sure is a spaceship console fit together seamlessly once you line them up.

He resolutely does not think about how well his and Alex’s bodies fit when they spread out in the back of Michael’s truck on a deserted stretch of land.

~~

Part of Michael’s grand plan, before he had to cover up three murders and his life went to shit, included having money in his pocket when he left Roswell. Sanders let him work part time at the junkyard once he’d proven his ability to fix cars, but that didn’t pay him much.

One of the kids Michael had been in the group home with now lived on the outskirts of town and sold drugs out of his home. He let Michael sell his weed and take a cut of the profits. Max disapproved on the principle that he had a huge stick up his ass, but Isobel was happy to buy his weed as long as he didn’t tell another soul she smoked.

Selling weed meant he had an additional, more plentiful stream of cash revenue. It also added to the pile of things that marked him as trouble. The first stop on his criminal tour, nevermind that he wasn’t the only person who dealt or that he had no family to pay for things a college scholarship wouldn’t cover. He never even sold anything harder, no matter how many times his supplier tried to talk him into it. 

He does try something stronger, once, and winds up on a half-blurry adventure which ends when he wakes up next to Rosa Ortecho. She gives him a panicked look that he responds with, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone, I’m also the family fuckup,” which at least makes her laugh before they part ways.

He sticks to weed and booze after that.

~~

Michael feels Alex slide his fingers into his hair and closes his eyes, leaning into the feeling.

“Guerin,” Alex murmurs, but Michael stubbornly keeps his eyes closed. If this is a dream, he wants to drag it out for as long as possible.

He feels Alex nuzzle his jaw, an unmistakably tender gesture.

“Alex,” he says, helplessly.

“Open your eyes,” he can feel Alex’s smile against his cheek.

“What if you disappear?” slips out of his mouth.

Lips press against his, Michael reacts automatically and kisses back. His hands gravitate toward Alex’s hips like a compass seeking north.

“I’m here, Guerin, and I’m real. Open your eyes.”

He does and is caught in Alex’s gaze. They could be seventeen, they could be twenty seven. Some things never change.Michael may be the one who never looks away, but Alex can throw him off his game with just one look. So Michael responds with his only defense.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he says, voice rough.

Alex blushes, a reaction he’s had since the first time Michael had said it when they were kids. He’s never called anyone else that.

Michael smiles and leans in to kiss Alex again. 

~~

A few days after he and Maria break up, Isobel shows up at his trailer with a six pack. He’s sitting in one of the chairs outside, still three in a circle, feeling a little sorry for himself.

She sits down in the chair next to him, plunks the beer down on the ground between them, and says, “So, Alex Manes, huh?”

He glares at her, she pulls a beer out and extends it to him. He shakes his head, smiling slightly as he takes it from her.

“Yeah, Alex Manes,” he sighs, opening his beer and taking a long pull.

“Tell me everything,” she replies, curling up in the chair and opening her own beer.

~~

Alex couldn’t have known that Michael went to Rosa’s funeral because he felt guilty about staging the crash that killed her, but he definitely knew something was up.

Michael had parked his truck out on the ranch because the guys never cared as long as he didn’t leave shit everywhere. He’s lying on top of his sleeping bag, staring at his ruined hand and feeling numb. All of the shit from the past couple weeks is rattling around inside of his brain, he can’t even pick on thing to focus on. It’s why he doesn’t hear Alex until he’s directly in front of him.

“Hey,” Alex says, his eyes flitting from Michael’s hand to his face and back.

Michael blinks, startled, but too tired to do anything more. He hasn’t been sleeping well lately.

He swallows heavily, his “hey” coming out shaky.

Alex looks down at the ground, clears his throat. “I was just coming to see how you were. I mean, I know you probably don’t want—”

Michael cuts him off, pleading, “Come here, please.”

Alex crawls in beside Michael, as Michael turns to face him. His still-wrapped hand lies in between them. Michael lets out a shuddering breath as the full force of Alex’s concern hits him. Alex touches his arm, gently. He crumples, starting to cry as he feels Alex wrap careful arms around him.

“I know, I know,” Alex tells him over and over again. 

“I know, I know,” and Michael can hear his voice getting wet.

Michael clings to Alex tighter and when Alex kisses his temple, he has to swallow around the confession in his throat. He’s never been more grateful than now that Isobel and Max are so self-absorbed that they’ve missed this completely. 

Running Liz Ortecho out of town was the right thing to do, Michael believes this firmly, but he could never stand and watch as Isobel did the same to Alex.

~~

It’s insanely funny to him that Max ends up being the one to break. Funny in that Michael walks around for days wanting to hit something.

~~

He’s been doing his best to avoid the newly-resurrected Rosa Ortecho. It’s not that he really has any opinion on her as a person, it’s just that she’s alive because Max wouldn’t listen to him but he can’t be angry with Max because he’s dead.

Michael does make it a point to check in on Liz, though. He does this by dropping by the lab, usually with food or an embarrassing childhood moment involving Max. It’s a subtle way to get her to eat and remember that the outside world exists. Max would do it and in some way, Michael feels he’s making his brother proud by picking up the slack.

They’ve always been aware of each other in the sense that they were both kids who were too smart for the town they lived in. Only Liz got out and Michael stayed behind. It stings less than it used to, now that she knows that neither of them had a choice.

Liz’s sister was dead, so she had to leave. Michael thought his sister killed her, so he had to stay.

It binds them pretty well. He’s got some experience dealing with a sister who may not actually be older than him, but treats him like he’s younger. Liz is no longer younger than her sister and that’s a wound which will likely never heal, all Michael can offer is some superficial advice on dealing with the small stuff. She seems to appreciate it all the same.

Their mutual love of science works when the personal shit seems to falter. She doesn’t love to figure out how things work like he does, but the human body has infrastructure of its own and they can figure out what the other is working on even with their different specialties. Liz is actually trying to convince him to go for his Bachelor’s now that their support system has grown.

He doesn’t think it’s really worth it, a mechanic in Roswell doesn’t need a degree and the only place he plans on going wouldn’t require one either. Even then, he’s not sure he’ll really go. Still, it’s a nice thought.

~~

Michael’s life tends to be one terrible thing after another, which is why it takes him a decade and some weeks to realize that the incident with Jesse Manes has fucked Alex up. To Michael, that terrible day in the shed is definitely in the top 5 worst things to ever happen to him, but it’s got a bunch of other horrible shit competing for top spot and he’s comfortable with his chosen coping mechanisms. He figured it was the same for Alex; Michael _knows _he wasn’t the only abused kid in that relationship.

It doesn’t occur to him that it fucked Alex up with regards to _him_ until he’s standing in the caves, watching Liz and Isobel fight about what to do about Max.

Max is in a pod right behind them; Michael can’t even look at him but he can’t leave either. He can feel Isobel’s fear like an echo of his own cutting through Liz trying very hard to convince them of her plan to deal with the Max situation. It’s a fine plan, except the last part involves putting Max in a hospital, which makes him and Isobel balk. 

Logically, it would be fine. Isobel was in the hospital and they managed to avoid detection. Valenti is pretty solidly team alien at this point and is charming enough to deflect any questions, particularly from his mom. They could say he isn’t fit for visitors until the requisite time was up, then have him home and back into his routine.

It would be the latest in a string of odd occurrences in this tiny town that everyone would just roll with, Liz says, unintentionally echoing the last thing Max said to him.

In his darker moments Michael used to be grateful that his siblings had the same fear of discovery and dissection that he did. It was the one thing strong enough to keep them together. Now he regrets it because Isobel won’t back down, Liz keeps shooting him sideways glances like she expects him to interject and sway his sister, and all he wants is a drink.

He won’t take Liz’s side, because despite the fact that she’s largely proven to be trustworthy, they have a pretty damn good reason to be cautious. Max loves her, which gives her power over Max. He and Isobel love Max, so she really has power over all of them. 

It’s like a fucking lightbulb going off in his head.

His and Alex’s relationship has been conducted largely in secret, something he had understood and agreed with as a kid. It was when out-and-proud Alex Manes still wouldn’t acknowledge him in public that Michael got pissed. Now he realizes that Alex isn’t ashamed to be seen with Michael because he thinks Michael’s wasting his life. At least, not totally. 

Alex won’t be seen with him because of Jesse Manes.

Alex isn’t afraid of his father, not in the way you do when you’re legally a minor and are in a house you cannot leave. He’s afraid of his father _for Michael_. He’s afraid of drawing Jesse’s attention to Michael, probably more now that the alien cat is out of its pod.

Michael’s view of the incident had been that Jesse Manes was a fucked up individual and that Alex had to get out of there. Clearly Alex had internalized some of that day as being his fault, like he could have known, but Michael’s been around abusive people his whole life and he knows that you can’t really predict anything.

Michael does what he now does when faced with emotional revelations: he leaves Liz and Isobel in their stalemate to get drunk alone in his trailer.

~~

Once, he had overhead someone at the Wild Pony say to someone, “The most perfect way to sum up this town is that our best mechanic, the one who can fix pretty much anything, has a permanently broken hand.”

The other person had laughed in agreement.

Michael had woken up the next morning in his truck in the bar’s parking lot. Instinctively, he had raised his hand to block out the light of the sun. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was his left hand with beams of light penetrating where his fingers went crooked.

~~

“Do you always rehearse what you’re going to say like that?” he asks, mostly teasing but also a little curious.

“Only when I have something important to say,” Alex responds defensively.

“So you’re saying that there have been multiple times where you’ve practiced what you were gonna say to me before you’ve said it?” Michael asks, smirking a little.

From the look on Alex’s face this is clearly something he doesn’t want to linger on and Michael half-hopes that Alex will take the smirk to mean that Michael’s being an asshole and pick a fight with him.

Anything to cover the fact that Michael is fascinated by this newly learned quirk of Alex’s. Sometimes he wants to approach Alex like he does with anything mechanical — take him apart until he learns how all of him works. 

Alex just shrugs, “Yeah, but with you it doesn’t always work.”

Michael frowns, “What do you mean?”

Alex looks past Michael toward his trailer when he replies, “You mix me up, surprise me. I spend all this time figuring out exactly what I’m going to say and then you say or do something that completely throws me off.”

“Sounds like a hassle,” Michael says tentatively. 

“I kind of like it, actually,” Alex says, equally as tentative. 

~~

Some days Michael thinks that he must’ve actually been awake all those long years in the pod. It would explain why he feels tired all the time, why he’s continually going through the motions. Alcohol is the perfect coping mechanism when you mostly feel nothing interrupted by sharp stabs of previous pains. It goes hand-in-hand with picking fights, adrenaline to get his heart pumping and booze to numb the physical pain.

The only other time he feels good is when he’s with Alex, and even that combusts on a regular basis. Alex’s need to organize his thoughts is not one Michael shares nor one he really understands. Reacting quickly and then dealing with the consequences after is how he’s lived this long, how he copes. 

There are some days when he thinks about Alex and wonders if he’s doing it wrong, if he should be tucking his traumas into his pockets and keep walking instead of burying it in booze and bar fights. If he and Alex constantly fight because the ways they move through the world are fundamentally at odds. 

Though the way Alex is moaning loud and long tells Michael that there’s at least one way they move well together. 

He’s not sure why he and Alex keep tumbling into bed together after ten years of absolutely no contact, but Michael’s not going to look at this too hard. He’s not exactly known for his introspection, as long as Alex continues to show up and kiss him back, Michael’s going to enjoy it while it lasts.

He rolls his hips into Alex, gradually slowing down just to hear Alex whine desperately. The only time he’s sure Alex has residual feelings for him in when they’re in bed together. Michael’s had sex with a lot of people since Alex, but it hasn’t felt good in the same way. He gets a sense of satisfaction in giving Alex pleasure, in making him feel good. Having to relearn Alex’s body just made doing so all the more satisfying.

“_Michael_, come on,” Alex moans.

Michael obediently picks up the pace, helpless to deny Alex anything when he says Michael’s first name. They’re in Michael’s trailer again, Alex having shown up for reasons Michael can’t recall now but were probably just an excuse. They’ve always made do with cramped spaces: the cot in the shed, the bed of Michael’s truck, closets and alleyways. Michael likes being pressed against Alex like this, doesn’t want to know what would happen if they had more space to spread out.

Alex make needy, impatient noises as he gets close and Michael instinctively responds with low, soothing sounds while he gets a hand around Alex’s cock. He loves watching Alex come, holds himself back so he can watch the long line of Alex’s throat and his eyes close in ecstasy. 

He fucks Alex through it, then comes with his head turned away and his eyes closed. He doesn’t know what Alex would see in them, only that it wouldn’t go well for him. Michael pulls out of Alex and plasters himself against the wall, as far away from the other man as Michael can get without getting out of bed. 

The post-orgasm part has always been Michael’s least favorite because it signaled that their time together was running out. 

The silence stretches around them and Michael shuts his eyes, keeping them shut even through the sounds of Alex getting up and getting dressed. He doesn’t expect the soft hand in his hair, so he stiffens and the hand vanishes quickly. 

He hears Alex stifle a sigh and then the door to the trailer opens and shuts. Michael breathes out.

~~

Isobel shows up at his trailer a couple weeks after Noah dies thrumming with energy. She lines up a six pack’s worth of empty beer bottles he’s got lying around and proceeds to demonstrate exploding them with her mind.

She finishes with a flourish clearly messier than she meant to, but he’s proud along with shocked as he returns her delighted hug. 

Michael wonders if he and Max have done Isobel a disservice by spending all of these years treating her as though she were made of glass. Clearly she’s stronger than both of them.

~~

Mimi had still been primarily running the Wild Pony when Michael started making his reputation as the town drunk. He had objectively been too young for such a title, barely past legal drinking age, but what he lacked in experience he made up for in frequency.

Max had first been concerned about him, then his concern quickly turned to annoyance. Despite all of his spouting of feminist ideas, Max had always believed that Michael should shoulder his trauma in the same way he did — silent stoicism. Isobel gave him more leeway, probably because she thought he was suffering guilt from having murdered three people. Eventually, though, she started becoming ashamed of him too.

He never spent time at the bar itself like he did when Maria was working, would just get his drinks and linger along the wall or hustle pool. He never liked the way Mimi looked at him, like she knew he was full of shit and was trying to figure out what he was hiding. 

Michael has always believed that she really is psychic — his existence shouldn’t be possible and yet here he is, so why not Mimi?

~~

He shows up on Alex’s porch one night like a stray, shoulders hunched.

Alex looks like he’d been getting ready for bed when he opens the door.

His expression is a mixture of concern and wariness, which stings, but Michael knows he deserves it.

“What do you want, Guerin?” Alex sounds tired.

Michael takes a deep, bracing breath. “I know I’m an asshole and you have every right to be pissed at me, but I think I owe you a conversation. Or, at least, I owe it to you listen. Actually, I _want_ to listen to what you have to say. I didn’t before because I was scared. So please, can we talk?”

Alex stares at him for a few moments, expression unreadable. Then, he softens.

“Come inside, it’s cold out here.”


End file.
